The track dedicated to Social + Non-Profit will gather ambitious life stories about helping others and projects whose purpose is to invest everything in making the world a better place. You will have the opportunity to meet colleagues from your field of interest and join forces, learn how to use pre-configured Drupal distributions and get inspired by ambitious social impact projects built with Drupal. Also learn how Drupal can be used to ensure accountability, trustworthiness, honesty, and openness to every person who has invested time, money, and faith into a non-profit organization. Talk and share ideas, learn from each other, improve, innovate … and take a leap forward. There are a lot of things you will learn, no matter your technical skill level. From developers to people with a big heart, you will for sure find something that inspires you.

We are looking for submissions in various topics. Here are some ideas to share your experience on with the rest of the world.

Every nonprofit organization must apply the 3 E’s: Economy, Efficiency, Effectiveness. Economy forces you to handle your project with low budgets, that is almost always the case with non-profit organizations. Efficiency is required also due to low resources available to most non-profit organizations. Effectiveness ensures you get the job done and complete your targets. How are you doing that? What tools and practices ensure this?

We live in a world that is changing every day and technology is a big part of it. What are the new technologies you integrate in social projects? What do you need and what do you find on the market? How drupal is helping you achieve your goals?

Transparency, accountability and full disclosure on operations is a must for all non-profit organizations. People will donate to and support campaigns only if they know exactly where the money goes and how are things handled. This way, they ensure their credibility in front of the world. How do you technically implement this?

A lot of people talk about making the world a better place. But talking is not enough. You have to take action! How do you plan to do it? How do social activities raise the level of engagement in your community? How are people’s lives improved by your actions?

Non-profit is done mainly from the heart. Volunteering is the key word. What are your life stories about helping others, inspirational first hand experiences? Why, what and how did you do it? What drives you? What are your goals?

About industry tracks

As you’ve probably read in one of our previous blog posts, industry verticals are a new concept being introduced at Drupal Europe and replace the summits, which typically took place on Monday. At Drupal Europe these industry verticals are integrated with the rest of the conference — same location, same ticket and provide more opportunities to learn and exchange within the industry verticals throughout three days.

About the Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering digital solutions in the government space around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — which has a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

What is digital transformation?

It is 2018 and we are still talking about digital transformation? Wasn’t that finished and done ten or fifteen years ago? Not completely. Based on the study from Grand View Research the global digital transformation market size was valued at $177.27 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $798.44 billion by 2025. It seems like we have just started and a business that does not join the movement will be left behind.

But what is digital transformation? We see it as the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. This new approach to customer experience through digital experience is where a platform like Drupal fits in perfectly.

Digital transformation and Drupal

To build connected, omnichannel customer experiences, the technology must have a built in way to support communication between channels, such as physical locations, ecommerce, mobile applications, and social media. Drupal 8 provides APIs for creating solutions and is definitely not limited to being a website platform. With this approach, the ability to engage customers through multiple channels at the same time has become a reality. Enterprises like Bayer, who evaluated and chose Drupal as their preferred platform in November 2017, have embraced the idea of embarking on the digitalization journey with an open source software that has been around for almost two decades and has a clear vision to become the world’s leading omnichannel customer experience solution.

Europe’s biggest Drupal event in 2018

Drupal Europe will be the largest conference in Europe happening in 2018. Drupal Europe organizes the program and session selection process around industry verticals. These focus on usage of Drupal in real life scenarios, in specific target industries, alongside space to cover cutting edge technologies. Digital transformation has become an important movement and the Drupal community has recognized that and dedicated a track to it.

Join us on September 10–14, 2018 in Darmstadt, Germany to learn first hand how Drupal enables digital transformation. You can register for the event at https://drupaleurope.org/tickets.

Present your vision at Drupal Europe

Drupal Europe is organized for the community by the community. This means everyone is invited to participate in the program and share their ideas with us. We are currently looking for submissions for sessions, panels, and workshops. To create an excellent submission, you should write a good abstract that helps track chairs and conference visitors to understand how and why you approach your topic, what will be the benefits and learnings gained by attending your session, and what is the expected experience level of the audience.

Main topics we are looking for:

Digital transformation with Drupal (case studies)What was your process of digital transformation, what were the business goals, what part Drupal plays in the solution and how did you measure success?

Enterprise products made for or made with Drupal

What can enterprise use to complement Drupal to support their requirements? Are there reusable solutions out there that can serve as enterprise platform?

Technical solutions provided with DrupalHaving Drupal as the chosen technology for digitalization, what does Drupal offer out of the box or what did your organization develop on top of the framework?

You will speak in front of digital leaders like CTOs, CIOs and CMOs of businesses who will be there to evaluate Drupal on a strategic level. Sessions will attract people looking to gain tactical advice on how to tackle the challenges of digitalization of their organizations or their clients.

We are looking to provide value to our track’s attendees, to empower them with insights and give them information that will enable them to make better decisions when choosing Drupal as their platform of choice.

Regardless of being a freelancer, a two person shop or a hundred plus agency, Drupal is vital to our success in growing and supporting our business.

The business ecosystem is changing rapidly, thereby making it a necessity for agency leaders, managers and advisors to focus on a multitude of challenges and opportunities.

Understanding how the marketplace is evolving, driving innovation, fostering the right company culture, and adopting efficient project management methodologies, are all challenges faced by businesses today.

We all want to transform our business by working with the smartest team, create and deliver amazing projects, and have ideal customers lining up to work with us.

Any Drupal conference cannot be complete without in-depth discussions and debates about these challenges and more.

What is this track about?

The Agency Business track will provide insight, support and real stories from people running businesses and managing projects. Learn about other people’s experiences, and get tips and ideas on how to tackle the challenges faced in your business or project.

Come to this track to learn / speak about

Agency growth

Growing and scaling your business can be a tricky and daunting task. We need to consider strategies for how to grow our businesses, and how to do so sustainably.

With increased competition from both other agencies and other platforms, we need to look at not only how we generate new leads for our businesses, but how do we convince potential clients that Drupal is the best, that we are the best?

Leadership and Culture

What is the right company culture for my business? How can I better lead my agency through the challenges ahead? How can I provide good leadership to my team? How can we grow and scale our business, without losing our company culture along the way? These are just some of the questions we will look to answer in the Agency Business track.

Operations

Project management is a bit of a juggling act, with many different needs and tasks that need to be taken care of simultaneously. We’re always on the look-out for ways to increase a project’s effectiveness and efficiency, while reducing the risk of it getting out of control. Let’s share our experiences and ideas on how we can improve project planning, better manage timelines & budgets, and keep staff motivated, while all the time keeping clients happy and engaged in the process.

Diversification

Markets change faster and faster, so does our market. We need to adapt our products and offering to stay competitive and minimize our business risks. Perhaps it means diversifying your service offerings, perhaps it means developing a product, perhaps it means extending into new markets or verticals. However, we also need to consider how to keep clients happy and how to continue to meet their changing needs through innovation and/or diversification.

How to get involved

At Drupal Europe, we want to ensure that attendees get the most from this track through highly valuable and insightful sessions. We are looking for speakers to openly and honestly share stories about their challenges and how they solved it. We want to hear about your experiments, successes and failures, process discoveries, strategies, and tactics. We want real-life learnings, supported by facts and figures — prove to us that your way is best.

Want to submit a session under Agency Business Track?

Whatever your experience is, whether it be running a small 2 person operation or scaling to 30 and beyond, or managing projects and project teams, we want to hear from you. Your experience and insight is invaluable and we know others will think so too.

Know a great speaker?

Do you know someone who could be a great speaker? Or perhaps you know someone who has an interesting story to share? If so, please get in touch with the program team at [email protected].

And don’t forget to help us to spread the word about this awesome conference. Our hashtag is #drupaleurope.

We look forward seeing you in Darmstadt!

About Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering digital solutions in the government space around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — with a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

Drupal Europe is both a technology conference and a family reunion for the Drupal community. Bringing together 1600+ attendees, it is the largest community driven Drupal event taking place on the European continent this year. For anyone connected with Drupal this is a unique opportunity to share your experience, learn, discuss, connect and contribute back to the community.

Being a community driven conference, we wanted to focus on real life case studies and not the usual technology driven structure. So we’ve introduced industry tracks which focus on specific industry sectors.

Calling all college, university, and educational Drupalers!

The Higher Education track is for anyone using Drupal or thinking of migrating to Drupal at a college or university who is looking to connect with other Higher-Ed Drupal users.

If you have experience of delivering Drupal solutions in the higher education sector or are looking for inspiration on how you continue to develop your CMS further, this is the right track for you.

Be inspired

Drupal is a popular choice in higher education, and many of us are using it in creative and inventive ways. With Drupal 8, the opportunities for exploration and experimentation expand even further — from headless Drupal to top-tier configuration management. Let’s showcase our successes and best-practices with Drupal 8!

We know many universities are still on Drupal 7 and are keen to migrate to Drupal 8, so come to share what works for you and see wins from your peers.

Share your experience

Have you launched a Drupal 8 project recently that you are proud of? Started a campus Drupal users group and have tips for others looking to create their own? Developed a great user support model for your content editors? Conquered decoupled Drupal with your frontend stack? Share your awesome projects and lessons learned with your peers.

Target groups:

Example talks:

Drupal in a Day (how Global Training Days got to be a localized event)

From CMS to LMS

Web accessibility in higher education

GDPR and childrens information

Javascript for higher education

Migration from Drupal 7 to 8

How Drupal 8 API-first helps to integrate with existing IT-Infrastructure

Build your own Drupal Community

Session submission is open and we ask you to submit interesting session proposals to create an awesome conference. Session proposals are not limited to Drupal and all topics in relationship with Higher Education are welcome.

Please also help us to spread the word about this awesome conference. Our hashtag is #drupaleurope.

If you want to participate in the organisation or want to recommend speakers or topics please get in touch at [email protected].

About Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering digital solutions around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — with a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

Drupal Europe brings a unique opportunity to connect, share and learn from the Drupal community and to talk about what holds us together. We grew to be the biggest open source community under the tagline “Come for the code and stay for the community” which we strive to uphold.

Join us on September 10–14, 2018 in Darmstadt, Germany to discuss and learn about growing and strengthening communities and the challenges that come with that.

Drupal has been a historic example of how Open Source communities can thrive and to maintain this leading position we need to learn from each other, include others and inspire everybody to be an active contributor. This might bring its challenges from time to time, so please come and share your stories, expertise and lessons learned with us. This is the only way to keep our community strong, diverse and open minded.

Who should attend?

You! This vertical topic will be the meeting place for everyone in Drupal and other communities.

Whether you want to organise events, you’re new to the community and want to know where you can get involved, or you want to share a success story from your community, you are welcome.

Target groups:

Members of the Drupal community

Other open source communities

Organisations and those interested in how communities work and prosper

As you’ve probably read in one of our previous blog posts, industry verticals are a new concept being introduced at Drupal Europe and replace the summits, which typically took place on Monday. At Drupal Europe. These industry verticals are integrated with the rest of the conference — same location, same ticket and provide more opportunities to learn and exchange within the industry verticals throughout three days.

About Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering thousands of digital solutions around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — which has a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

It took a while before I could write a new edition, I was just busy with the production of customer projects. Here again with a brand new version, what struck me in module updates in the past month:

1. D8 Editor Advanced link

A popular module that extends the standard editor in Drupal 8 with additional options for managing links. You can now add the following attributes:

title

class

id

target

rel

2. Password strength

Default password checks are stupid and annoying for the user: they can check the entered password meets certain rules, such as the number of characters and varying types herein (symbols, numbers, capital letters etc.).

This is a stupid way of checking because the password ‘Welcome123’ is accepted, while it is easy to guess.

This module enables a secure password policy by “pattern-matching” and “entropy calculation”. Almost every type of password is accepted, as long as it has sufficient entropy.

How it works

Instead of checking strict rules, this module calculates the expected time a brute force attack needs to retrieve the password. This is calculated based on underlying patterns:

Words that appear in a standard dictionary, common first and surnames and other default passwords.

Words from a dictionary, but written in Leet / 1337. For example, where the “e” is written as a three and “a” like an @.

A standard sequence of letters like “abcdef”, “qwerty” or “123456”

Dates or years.

This module has been around since 2007, I wonder why I only encounter this now :) It is currently available in alpha for Drupal 8 and stable for Drupal 7 available — it is supported by Acquia and Card.

So if you want people to not have to bother to look for a password such as “one special character, 1 upper case and at least 8 characters’, then this module offers a solution.

3. Better Field Descriptions

In order to give content managers issues, it is possible to write an explanation of all content fields that they import. But the standard explanation in a field in the backend of Drupal are often irrelevant, to not apply these generic texts in the implemented *user story* of the installation concerned.

After installing this module you can:

Content managers have their own explanation text per field.

Set where it stands: above or below the field.

The explanatory style that you like.

4. Better login

Want to make the standard Drupal login screen better? Then install this module and you are good to go: through template overrides you can then do the required further tuning of the layout of the login screen.

5. Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons

Another social sharing module, but as you see in the title: these are terribly responsive. The icons are SVG based and you need no external services such as AddThis.

Advantage: you’re less dependent and have your data in hand, downside: you have less functionality- such as comprehensive statistics.

6. Flush Cache

If you are not using Drush or Drupal console works then you can Drupal caches flush via “the ‘Flush all caches” button in the Drupal backend. But in a production environment, you will almost never flush all caches, it can cause severe performance problems.

This module solves that problem: install it and you have more control over the caches you want to flush.

7. Multiple Selects

Have your Drupal content management easier with ‘multiple selects’ administration, this image seems to me to speak for itself:

8. Neutral paths

If you are running a multilingual Drupal website, visitors can see the content in one language: the currently active language. Sometimes you would like to see pages in another language. In addition: content managers / Drupal administrators usually want English and not the backend *default language*, in our case, often Dutch.

Issue tracking for example, much easier if the backend is in English: Drupal documentation and support in English is much more available than in Dutch.

This module ensures that you can visit other pages in another language than the default. And can navigate the backend in English, while frontend is in another language.

9. Password Reset Landing Page (PRLR)

Drupal core includes a ‘password’ function: If you have forgotten your password then you can request a one-time login link that is automatically mailed to you.

If you click on the login link, you will see a screen with a login button. Once you click the ‘login’ button you are logged in and you are redirected to your profile page — that’s it.

You are in this situation where your password is lost / forgotten. You are not required to change your password. This is not usually done, so people often endlessly request login links.

This module solves this: the screen where you end up after clicking on the login link not only contains a login button, but also a function to change your password immediately.

10. Auto Purge Users

The user list in Drupal is usually not or hardly ever administered. If people have long been inactive or have not completed their registration, the account can usually be removed to avoid overhead and security issues.

This module does it for you automatically, it checks inactivity below a point and blocks users if they meet:

11. Vertical Tabs Config

Want to influence the order of the Drupal tabs? Or do you want some tabs to not show all of your content manager? To keep tabs simple and usable you can install this module: select which tabs to show and in what order.

12. Custom Search

The default Drupal search is fine, but really standard: you have few options to tune the engine. After installing this module, changes that you can then include are:

Change the default label in the search box.

Set a default text in the search box.

Tune ‘Advanced Search’.

Change the text on the “submit button”.

And much more, see module page:

13. Persistent Login

Drupal 8 core does not have a ‘remember password’ function when you log in. You can remain automatically logged for some time, but that is based on a PHP session. This module does not, you can also:

How long users can stay logged in.

How many places a person can be logged in at once.

Select certain pages that the user must log in again at. These are usually pages where more sensitive information is available.

Allow the user to delete all his logins themself.

14. Realistic Dummy Content

Wisdom

Using the Devel module you can automatically generate content so you can see if your modules / themes work well. But it gives an unrealistic picture of the end result, this module generates more realistic images and texts.

15. Password Policy

Although I am a fan of the aforementioned ‘Password strength’ module, this can also be useful if you want to make a specific password policy on your Drupal website.

16. Mass Password Reset

This module, we often use to implement Drupal social intranet: previously, all users and content created by an administrator on a test environment, without it people were informed through e-mail.

Once the social intranet went live, we sent all users at once an email with a login link via this module; the system was live!

Wrap Up

So far that’s what I noticed last month in Drupal modules, stay tuned for more fat Drupal content!

Currently we are busy constructing the production of a realtime messaging platform in Drupal and NodeJS, look at it as a ‘WhatsApp for Business’. This Drupal system works like a web app; logging in is mandatory. How do you make sure that logged out visitors must log in to Drupal 8 before they are allowed to continue?

Drupal has many out-of-the-box functionalities, as well as a powerful API, but because it has so many functions many tracks are standardly available for anonymous visitors. We’d want to make all paths unreachable, until you log in.

That means that visitors always will be redirected to the login screen as long as they aren’t logged in. You wouldn’t want an anonymous user reaching internal news on the homepage.

Redirect URL in Drupal 8

Basically, we want all url’s / paths be made unavailable for non-logged in visitors, except explicitly specified pages like:

Login (/user)

Forgot password (/user/password)

Login link (user/reset/login)

in Drupal 7 you could use the module Logintoboggan for that purpose. You could also easily work around it in hook_init() or hook_boot() in a custom Drupal 7 module.

Quest

This was quite a puzzle, and we soon found some examples as well as exceptions. Everytime it didn’t work how we wanted it to. This example was the most useful.

Implementation in Drupal 8

Eventually, we got it working with the help of following code in a custom Drupal 8 module:

services.yml

put this file in your module root, and format yourmodulename.services.yml:

RedirectAnonymousSubscriber.php

Put the file RedirectAnonymousSubscriber.php in folder /src/EventSubscriber/ and do your custom thing:

We are always striving for optimal Drupal contrib modules use. Yet, in some cases they won’t meet the required standards, desires, stability and/ or security. That’s when we develop tailor made codes; sometimes with the help of other modules’ snippets.

When we have to do tailor made development, we’ll always strive to make it generic, making it possible to produce a contrib module, which can be released on Drupal.org. We’ll always do this in consultation with the client.

Such an example is the just released module ‘Conditional Redirect’: some modules were close, but just didn’t meet the requirements.

Shield Drupal with a login

It’s about the following functionality: imagine you are producing a system in Drupal meant for internal use, like a kind of intranet or management app.

This system has to be globally available, but only accessible after people logged in. In that case you would want people who are not yet logged in linked to the login page.

As extra wish: certain pages do have to be publicly accessible and should be configured as exception.

Above is realized in the released module: after installation all logged out (anonymous) visitors will be redirected to the login page. Exceptions can be configured as well:

Currently we are busy building a realtime chat platform called Lus. In Lus we connected Drupal to NodeJS for a blazing fast system, with realtime communication (chats, tasks & file sharing).

Within Lus, people can cooperate in ‘channels’, comparable to the WhatsApp groups. Team communication takes place in these channels. A channels works best if you organize it around a certain topic, like ‘sales’.

As soon as a new channel is being started, existing team members can be added in the easiest way imaginable: with the help of a ‘auto-complete field’: as soon as you start typing, suggestions will immediately pop up, in this case for names of team members:

This auto-complete field has been custom developed by us, in part because our Drupal installation uses custom database charts which aren’t available in Drupal 8 core. How did we do it:

1. The form element

To get started we need the Drupal auto complete form element, allowing users on the front end to pick the desired team members. We define this as follows:

Because we use #autocomplete_route_name element, Drupal knows that such a form element has to be ignored on the front end.

2. Custom route

As you can see in the form element, a reference is made to the route, from which data has to be obtained. We’ll add these in the .routing.yml file:

This routing.yml file is already in our module’s root.

3. Controller with custom query

In the route we just created we refer to a custom controller AutocompleteController, method handleAutocomplete. This one can be found in the map moduleroot/src/Controller:

This method ensures that the right data is collected from the data base and will be given back correctly formatted as well.

Wrap it up

As you can see, suggestions are being given for code corrections. In an optimization run we’ll get onto it. For now, at least the data is coming though correctly and we can create new channels with existing team members by means of a auto-complete field.

Our year-end rush is in full swing. Briefly looking back, we have had a good year! For the last time this year, the module updates, and what struck me:

1. Block Refresh

A block in Drupal will not change its content by itself. Perhaps you would like a block to refresh automatically: so that visitors of your Drupal website will get to see for example every 15 seconds a new article, or an urgent message coming through without people having to refresh their page.

After installing this module you can set this per block in three different ways:

Automatically via a timer (f.e. every 15 seconds).

Manually with the aid of a ‘refresh link’.

Once per ‘page load’.

Even when you have enabled Drupal’s block cache this module can make sure you will get to see new content.

2. Simplify

If you look at a standard Drupal form to add, for example, a new page, it looks a bit messy. There is a lot of information on the screen, which is redundant for content managers. This commonly used module cleans up that junk.

3. W3C Validator

A W3C validated web page means that the HTML formatting is correct according to the standards. This means that the structure is sound and that probably all browsers and screen readers can properly read the page; this is also good for your SEO. This module helps you with W3C validations:

4. Search 404

A standard 404 page (‘page not found’) gives rather poor information to your visitors. This popular module will change that: it does not show a static page, but will search into your Drupal system and will show your visitors results of pages they might have been looking for.

This feature will also have a positive impact on the SEO of your Drupal system.

6. Block by date

Let’s assume you want to place a notification at a given time within a block in your Drupal site. For example, an offer, notification or maintenance message. Then this module can come in handy: it can automatically switch a block between a specific date and time on and off for you.

7. Scheduled maintenance

It is preferred to announce a scheduled maintenance on a website. So users know that the site — or part of it — is temporarily unavailable. Within the Drupal core functionality it is possible to enable the ‘maintenance module’ for your website, but it is only possible to turn it off or on.

With this module you can automatically inform your website visitors (or social intranet) about a scheduled maintenance:

10. Form Bloc IP — FBIp (Drupal 7 & Drupal 8)

Maybe you encountered this problem before: a user tries to log in, but forgot his/her password. After several failed attempts Drupal blocks the user for some time. And that block cannot be made undone by an admin in the Drupal backend; only directly via the database.

This module is solving that problem and other problems:

An admin screen to unblock blocked users.

Log IP addresses of spammers and block them.

Create a white list of IP addresses; only those IP’s can from now on send (login) forms.

12. Search API attachments

By default Drupal indexes only content from nodes. If you are also working with attachments in Drupal I can imagine that you also want to index the contents of those files, so that they are included when visitors are performing searches in your Drupal site.

This module is helping with that, it is an add-on for the Search API module and requires the Apache Tika Library. It also runs on Apache Solr. Solr is preferred otherwise your database can quickly become too large, which results in time consuming searches and visitors dropping out.

13. Navbar Awesome

An add-on for the Navbar module. The Navbar is a common used module for Drupal 7 providing easy and responsive backend navigation. It is similar to the default navigation bar in Drupal 8. This Navbar Awesome module gives the Navbar a more ‘clean’ and modern look.

14. Taxonomy unique

Do you want to make sure that all terms (keywords/tags) entered in one Drupal vocabulary are unique? After installing this module Drupal will check if that is the case. When you enter a term that is not unique, then an error will be shown.

16. Rename Admin Paths

An additional security for your Drupal backend. With this module you can change the default backend paths such as /admin/… and /user/… into something else. So spambots, hackbots and hackers do not know which URL to use.

18. Memcache Storage

When you are managing a high performance Drupal site, then chances are that you have implemented the Drupal Memcache module. This module is only an integration and gives statistics per page about the Memcache use, but does not provide any other administrative tasks herein. This module is an alternative and does offer additional administrative tasks for the Memcache actions within your Drupal system, including:

19. User Password Reset Link Timeout

Once you create a user within Drupal you can send a one-time login link; which is by default valid for 24 hours. This period cannot be set automatically, after installing this module it is. We recently used it with an implementation of Drupal social intranet OpenLucius, in which we first imported users and then sent a login link simultaneously via the Mass Password Reset module.

21. Dummy image

When you are developing on your localhost, then usually you do not have all images from a live environment stored on your local computer. This is resulting in lots of broken images and delays in page loads. This module makes sure you get to see dummy images so that it is not needed to constantly sync all images from live and yet it is possible to test them locally.

22. Stage file proxy

Another solution to the same problem described above: when you have not stored all files and images locally. When you install this module and it finds an image that is locally not found, then it copies the image from live to local. It only does this for the pages you visit locally so you need minimal disk space; especially handy when dealing with a large site with many files/images.

The holidays are over for a while now, so it’s about time for a new blog. In this article I’ll discuss 12 modules that can help you get started with a great Drupal site:

1. Max image size

A default Drupal installation can check if an uploaded image is too large and display a warning. This module does something similar but is also checking previously uploaded images that are too large and likely taking up too much space. It scans all the images (also already uploaded ones) and reduces the size of the original

2. User Import

3. Select (or other)

Drupal’s form API knows by default a select element that allows you to offer choices to those who enter content. This element is limited to the provision of predefined terms (categories). After installing this module, this element can be expanded with an additional field: let the end user choose ‘other’ and offer a free selection field.

4. Captcha-free Form Protection

Everybody wants to be protected against spammers, this is often done through the Captcha technology; probably you have heard of this before. This module protects you against spammers without Captcha, since this is often a barrier for visitors.

The module applies other techniques (‘behind the scenes’) such as checks if cookies / javascript are disabled, it can also check whether a certain time has exceeded. On the basis of these data it can determine whether the person who sent a form is most likely a spammer or not. The Honeypot module contains similar end features.

5. Twitter block

6. Leaflet

Leaflet is a javascript library that is quickly becoming popular and that let’s you create maps. It is an alternative to Google maps, allowing you to easily create customized maps and integrate external map services (for example Mapbox, Stamen or Thunderforest). Easy to configure, mobile-friendly to navigate and light in code.

7. Better watchdog UI

The Drupal core has a logging module which gives great insights in errors, notices, content and user actions, etc. Install this module if you want to filter better in this log. FYI: Till Drupal 5 Drupal’s logging module was called ‘watchdog’, this term is still used for logging elements.

8. Check for acknowledgement

In some cases you want to know whether users of your system have read a particular piece of content. This is now possible after installing this module: it places a check mark at the bottom of a content page. Users placing the check mark are logged which is visible to you as a site administrator. This allows you to see who really confirmed they read the article.

11. Date Facets

12. Read only mode

When putting your system in the maintenance mode in a default Drupal installation, the entire system will be temporarily put offline; the visitors will receive a maintenance message. Usually you would prefer that nobody is logged in on your site, as content can be changed during the update process. Those changes could be lost.

If you can ensure that nobody can enter/change content during maintenance, then you are also adequately covered — provided that your update is not generating errors. This module is doing just that: it places your site in the maintenance mode, so visitors can still view the site but cannot enter/change content.

Lately I have been hearing a lot about Laravel. This is a PHP framework to build web applications and that is quickly gaining popularity. I wanted to test it to keep up to date with this current technology. So I thought: I will build a concept in Laravel to see how it works and to compare it with Drupal 8.

1. Introduction to Laravel

In order to participate you will need to have the following basic knowledge and tools:

PHP: intermediate knowledge

HTML/CSS basic knowledge

Good code editor (IDE), I am using PHPStorm

A browser, f.e. Firefox

What is Laravel

A PHP framework for web applications

Developed by Taylor Otwell

First release: February 2012

Open Source (MIT licence)

Why Laravel

According to the developers it is a ‘clean, modern web application framework’, which is built on other great tools. In addition, it is said that Laravel is ‘fun to code’.

Laravel is a MVC Framework

MVC = Model View Controller, a modern structure of web applications.

Model: application data and functionalities

View: the visible output, the HTML

Controller: interaction between user, model and view. Facilitated in Laravel by PHP.

Standard tools in Laravel

Routing of incoming requests

HTML templating (Blade)

Database definition and version control (Laravel’s Migrations and Eloquent ORM)

Authentication: login users and manage permissions.

Emailing with attachments

Laravel core is not a cms like Drupal 8

Laravel out of the box is not a cms. There is a cms component available (October cms), but in this regard Laravel cannot be compared with Drupal 8, which does offer in the core full blown cms functionalities. If you want to compare Laravel with Drupal, you will need to do this on the level of Drupal API and not Drupal cms.

2. Laravel’s foundation

Laravel’s foundation is built on strong components:

Laravel is a framework built on several other strong frameworks. Below an explanation of each component:

2.1 Laravel’s foundation: Symfony

Symfony is one of the main components in Laravel. The following Symfony components are, among others, used in Laravel:

Future releases of Laravel Laravel has announced to stay in sync with future releases of Symfony.

Symfony users When you are a user of Symfony you can also use Laravel components.

2.2 Laravel’s foundation: Composer

Laravel uses Composer, a PHP dependency manager. The main features are:

2.4 Laravel’s foundation: Migrations

Tables can be created, structured and (version) controlled through Laravel’s Migrations. All this is done via code, not configuration.

2.5 Laravel’s foundation: Blade

Blade is Laravel’s html templating machine. A Blade file is saved with the extension ‘.blade.php’. Variables in the template file can be placed as follows: {{variable}} (XSS filtered) or {!! variable !!} (unfiltered, [!] only use this when you know exactly what you are doing). You can also use PHP functionalities and codes in blade files. Blade also supports subtheming and conditional controls.

3. Installing Laravel

I am working on a Mac with OS X El Capitan. The current Laravel version is 5.1, and that is the version I am going to use. Go to Laravel docs and follow the instructions:

Make sure you have installed Composer.

Make sure the directory ~/.composer/vendor/bin is in your PATH, so that the laravel command is everywhere available. Learn here how.

Now you can install via the command laravel new a fresh Laravel installation. I am now going to my webroot and enter laravel new blog concept: a fresh Laravel installation will be created in the folder /blogconcept:

The created install:

You will get an ‘application key’. This will be used, among other things, to encrypt data, such as session data.

Go to the Laravel installation and run this command: php artisan serve to activate the Laravel server. Artisan is Laravel’s command line environment.

4. Routing in Laravel

Static routes In routes.php you will see the default homepage defined, which you saw above in the browser. Here you can add your own routes. Below an example of a page with static information:

In a browser:

Dynamic routes Routes can also be built dynamically through working with variables:

Note the double quotes that are required to dynamically print out the variable. If you are using single quotes, Laravel will print literally {$person}.

In the browser:

5. Laravel’s Migrations: management of the database structure

First you will need a database, the standard used here is MySQL; I will make a database called ‘blog concept’. All the database settings are in config/database.php:

In this file you can set:

Fetch style

Type database: mysql is the standard, but Laravel also supports sqlite, pgsql and sql server.

The database connections, I am entering the following:

Tables can be managed manually through for example phpmyadmin, but that is not advisable. In Laravel the structure of tables/database can be programmed in code, resulting in flexibility and version control. ‘Database structure’ is also called ‘schema’.

By managing this in Laravel’s Migration developers can easily keep their databases in sync within a version control system, such as GIT. So you can also easily revert a database change.

Example: I am creating the initial migration file through command php artisan make:migration create_content_table. In the created file I am adding code that defines database tables:

This migration class exists of two methods: up and down. Up is used to create new tables, down is used to make the Up actions undone.

Execute command php artisan migrate, that will apply the migration code, and voila: the database tables are created:

The model is called ‘Content’ and not ‘Contents’, Laravel is smart enough to make that connection by itself.

Add the following code in routes.php:

$content = App\Content::find(1) => This is all it takes to query record with id=1 from the database table 'Contents', also here Laravel is smart enough to make the link with ‘Contents’. Then, all the fields from that record are stored in object $content, which can be assigned as variables to a blade template.

7. HTML templating in Laravel: Views & Blade

As previously indicated the HTML templating engine Blade is used in Laravel. The HTML files are called views, something else than Drupal Views: these are lists. An example of the use hereof can be seen immediately in the standard installation. In routes.php on line 15 the Laravel view ‘welcome’ is invoked: return view(‘welcome’);.

The views are included in the folder /resources/views, there you can also find the standard view ‘welcome.blade.php’:

An own dynamic view

Blade facilitates dynamically filling HTML pages. An example: I am creating a new view file called ‘about.blade.php’ and copy the HTML from welcome.blade.php:

I am adding the following code in routes.php:

You can see that the ‘about’ view is evoked through View::make() with an additional array included in which variables with content are defined that were previously loaded from the database.

8. Data from a RESTful Drupal 8 API

As an example I am using the Drupal 8 API that I built earlier. The json output is looking like this:

First I played a bit around with Composer packages Buzz & Guzzle, both http clients. Those packages are facilitating much more than just retrieving data from a REStful API: POST requests, streaming large uploads, streaming large downloads, using HTTP cookies, uploading from JSON data, etc…

That is too much overhead, for now I can work with a standard php functionality: file_get_contents en json_decode:

Create a new route: /blogs

Query the json data from the external Drupal 8 RESTful API.

Run through the json arrays data and create a new array where: key = url, value = blog title

Render the Blade html view ‘blogs’.

Then I am copying an existing blade view and rename it to ‘blogs.blade.php’:

In this blade html view I am running through the associative array and am creating in this way a list with links:

Creating the detail page of a blog

Finally I would like to accomplish that when I click a link, the detail page of that blog appears:

Create a new route with a variable

Request the data from the Drupal 8 RESTful API.

Look for a match in the url variable and a url in the json array from the API.

When a match is found, create the variable: the title and body from the matched item.

Render the html through a blade view.

In a browser:

As you can see, a lot still needs to be done concerning the styling. But as a purely functional concept, I am leaving it now the way it is.

Wrap up

Ok, that’s it for now. This is only an introduction in which I produced a concept. Many advanced components of Laravel have not yet been discussed, such as incorporating the logic code /routes.php that I placed to Models and Controllers. I would like to discuss this further in a next blog. Questions or feedback, let me know!

We got a lot of questions last year like: can I build a new project on Drupal 8? What do I have to do with my Drupal 6 install when Drupal 8 is released? Do I have to upgrade my Drupal 7 install when Drupal 8 is stable.

We see these sorts of questions more and more, because Drupal 8 will have a stable release in the foreseeable future. And that means end of life for Drupal 6. So what to do?

Drupal 8

You want to live the future without dragging the past behind you, Drupal 8 does that very well. It’s completely rebuild from the ground up and has a lot of cool features:

Drupal 8 is not backward compatible, I think that’s a good thing: you don’t want to drag legacy stuff behind you. That’s a big bucket on your boat.

So is it necessary to upgrade your current Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 to Drupal 8? Considerations for:

Drupal 6 to Drupal 8

Drupal 6 to Drupal 7

Drupal 7 to Drupal 8

Tools for upgrading to Drupal 8

Difficult process?

Generically spoken, to what degree a Drupal upgrade process is difficult depends on the initial Drupal website builder. If that party knew what they were doing and took a future upgrade into account, than I guess you’ll be quite safe. But if that party duct-taped and Cable tied your Drupal site… then you might have a bigger challenge.

1. Drupal 6 to Drupal 8

Drupal 6 — RIP (almost)

Community support for Drupal 6 ends when Drupal 8 gets released, just like with Drupal 5. If you are running on Drupal 6 it won’t say ‘kaboom!’ immediately, but you should have a plan to upgrade to 7 or 8.

Simple Drupal 6 websites

With a simple Drupal 6 website I mean a ‘brochure’ website. In this website you have a couple dozens of pages with some static information and maybe a blog about your organization, company or personal activities. So there are no complex functions like an online community, webshop or social intranet/extranet. The project costs initially were 40~200 hours.

If you have such a Drupal 6 ‘brochure’ site, then Drupal 8 will probably be a good candidate, as it has a lot of features out of the box and chances are you can don’t need extra modules. So upgrade to Drupal 8 asap will probably the best step.

More complex Drupal 6 websites

A more complex Drupal 6 website would be an online community, a webshop or a Drupal social intranet. There are contrib modules installed and additional custom modules. The project costs initially were more than ~ 300 hours.

In this case you probably need extra modules in Drupal 8 to migrate your system. When those modules are not yet migrated then you can wait for them. But it’s kind of uncertain when they will be migrated and stable. A status overview of Drupal 8 modules.

When it’s clear that the needed modules will be ported to Drupal 8 in the foreseeable future then maybe it’s best to wait for that and migrate asap after those modules became stable. If they are not migrated in the near future, then take a look at what Drupal 7 has to offer (see below).

If your needed functions are also not available in Drupal 7 modules, then you have to build it custom. It’s seems wise to do that in Drupal 8.

2. Drupal 6 to Drupal 7

When Drupal 7 was released, we waited a few months with migrating Drupal 5 and 6 sites. As soon as the necessary modules were ported we upgraded the sites.

If you can’t wait until the necessary modules are ported to Drupal 8, then upgrading your Drupal 6 system to Drupal 7 is an option. Of course the modules must be available in Drupal 7, stable.

Drupal 8 is almost 5 years in development, if this continues then Drupal 7 will be supported for a long while. Including the extra 3 months security support Drupal 7 will be supported until ~ 2019. This is a rough estimate; Drupal 9 will probably not be in development for 5 years, since it will not be build from the ground up.

3. Drupal 7

Al lot of arguments described above also apply to a Drupal 7 website. It really depends on the complexity of your system: how much custom and contrib modules you implemented. The more complex the site, the less smooth an upgrade to Drupal 8 will be.

Since Drupal 7 probably will be supported for the next 3~4 years, I see no maintenance reason to switch to Drupal 8. But if you want to use all cool new features of Drupal 8 then upgrading if worth the consideration.

4. Tools to upgrade to Drupal 8

Drupal 8 core ships with a migrate module with an import API. This takes care of a lot of upgrading stuff, see Drupal IMP group

If you have a Drupal 6 or 7 install with little active modules then chances are those modules won’t be available in Drupal 8 in near future. So maybe then you’ll have to do the upgrades on your own.

Here are some resources that can help you with upgrading your modules and content to Drupal 8:

Wrap up

So, malheureusement, there is no óne answer to the question: ‘when and how do I need to upgrade to Drupal 8’. It really depends on the complexity of your Drupal system. An analysis of your current system will be needed. You’ll have to compare your system with Drupal 7 and 8 core + available contrib modules.

So…. Drupal 8 got released! Congrats everybody! The end of life of Drupal 6 is then final. In addition, the 16th of november it was announced that Drupal.org is now serving its content and files via Fastly; which is giving a significant performance boost, well done!

Furthermore, what I noticed last month on module updates:

1) Scroll to destination anchors

This module modifies the behaviour of an ‘anchor’ within a page. So the page will not jump down but fluently scroll down. We have installed this module here.

2) Spider Slap

There are a lot of ‘evil spiders’ active on the internet. These are web crawlers that don’t respect what is written in your robots.txt. This can cause unnecessary load on your server and uncover information that you don’t want to see in a search engine. This module is solving this problem. It will block the IP when a spider does not behave, with as a result that it will no longer have access.

4) Database Email Encryption

Do you want to maximise the security of the email addresses of your registered users? This is possible with this module. It encrypts the addresses in the database. Should the database end up in the wrong hands, then the email addresses cannot be read. Encryption is done using AES.

5) Unique field

A popular module existing since Drupal 5, but I never noticed it before. It is performing a check on entered fields (e.g. title field) and checks whether the entered title is unique. This will prevent the use of double titles which is good for, among others, SEO.

6) Login History

By default Drupal is not creating a login archive. This module will do this for you: it creates an archive in which the history of logins will be stored.

9) Client side Validation

10) App Link

Probably you recognize this one: the message above a website on your Smartphone that you can view the page in a native app. If you built and linked an app (e.g. via DrupalGap) then you can generate this ‘app message’ on your Drupal website using this module.

12) Simple XML sitemap

The title of this Drupal 8 module says it all: it provides an XML sitemap that you can upload to search engines, so you can see the indexation of all your site links in the relevant search engine. The module also has a few configuration options like setting ‘priority’.

13) Session Limit

Tighten the security of your Drupal system by limiting the number of sessions with which a user is logged in. You can for example set that somebody can be logged in once; if somebody is logging in on his/her Smartphone then he/she will be automatically logged out on the work computer.

15) OpenLucius LDAP

Another own module, that should be mentioned as well ;-). This module extends Drupal social intranet OpenLucius with a LDAP connection, so that users can login to OpenLucius with their existing LDAP account.

So, like a bunch of other Drupal people, we’re also experimenting with Drupal 8; for our Drupal distro OpenLucius. Us being ‘less is more’-developers, one aspect we really like is dependency injection.

First things first, for all new developers we should explain exactly what dependency injection is. Dependency injection is an advanced software design pattern. It implements “inversion of control”, this sounds complex but it basically means that reusable code calls task specific code. (Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_of_control)

What does this mean for us Drupal developers?It means we can write more efficient code by reducing the load. We only load what we need.

Types of injection

There are multiple types of Dependency injection:

Constructor injection, where the dependency is injected through a class’s constructor.

Setter injection, where the dependency is injected through a setter method of a class.

Property injection, where a public field of a class is directly set.

All three methods have their pro’s and con’s I’ll try to explain these three in detail.

1. Constructor injection

There’s no real downside to using constructor injected dependency injections. The advantages are:

Constructor injection can ensure that a class cannot be constructed without a required dependency.

The constructor is only called once so the dependency cannot be altered afterwards

These two advantages do not limit the ability to use optional dependencies; these can be implemented using one of the other methods. It does however tend be a bit more difficult to extend the class or override the constructor.

Dependency injection Drupal

All of this was PHP dependency injection, which can be easily implemented in Drupal 8. I’ll show two simple ways to implement these three methods, which can be downloaded as an example module at the bottom of the page. I’ll show a direct approach to using these 3 methods and a service-based approach. Both are quite simple to implement.

For demonstration purposes i’ve created simple module containing the four classes now properly named in a namespace called ‘Drupal\dep_test’ where dep_test is the name of the module. The classes are now distinguishable from each other:

SimpleClassConstructor

SimpleClassSetter

SimpleClassProperty

SimpleType

Within this module I’ve added a simple Controller, which makes it easy to display values. In the controller class I’ve added the following code for a direct approach:

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has always been important, but in recent years its importance seems to have increased significantly. We were more often dealing with Drupal SEO implementations than in previous years. Many of the implementations contained overlapping components. Below we will discuss the most important ones:

1. Speed

Google Page Speed is a good indicator of how speed is experienced by end users and therefore by Google. Google attaches great importance to speed because end users are simply doing the same.

An example of a test of the front page of this site:

As you can see we can further optimize mobile and desktop by following the instructions provided. Although on our Dutch blog we have a Node.js frontend (and a headless Drupal 8 backend) a Drupal frontend can be tested as well with the Google Page Speed tool. The tool is testing, among others, the following:

JS and CSS aggregation and minimize (minify)

GZIP / browser caching

Optimized images

Landing page redirects

Prioritize visible content

User experience issues, for example the use of non generic plug-ins.

2. Schema.org

Schema.org is a collaboration between Google, Yahoo! and Bing to standardize the way data is structured in web pages. By using these standards these search engines are ‘snapping’ the content of your web page better, resulting in a significant SEO boost.

The schema.org library contains descriptive tags for content like films, persons, organizations, events, locations, etc. The purpose of the search engine is to make search results more clear, allowing people to easily find the right web pages.

3. Mobile compatible / responsiveness

2015 brought us mobilegeddon: if your website is not mobile ready then Google will appoint you penalties resulting in a lower ranking. And rightly so, a large part of the website visitors are using internet on their mobiles; and you would like to give them a good experience. You can test here if your website is mobile compatible.

4. Google Webmaster Tools / Search console

Essential SEO tool, sign in here and register your website. Then it is important to upload a XML sitemap. The Drupal module XML sitemap will help you with this. Once you have done that, you will be able to see how your website is ranking in the organic results of Google:

Which keywords enable your pages to be found in the search results.

What are people really clicking so that they land on your website.

Errors on your website.

Links that are not correct.

Links that are not accessible.

Schema.org implementation: how is Google treating the enriched html pages.

See below for example the dashboard of this website, with links unfolded and all the insights you can find here:

5. Write good, long content

Apparently Google is rating your Drupal website higher when you are publishing long and good quality content. Long and good pieces of content are also adding to the acquisition of new clients:

Areas of importance when writing content

Backlinks, make sure you get links on other websites that are highly rated.

Limit the number of relevant internal and external links, so that Google (and the — visitor) can better understand the context of your article.

Analyze the (successful) competitors: discover where they are, what they link and how they dominate social media.

Make sure your blog website is coherent, not a website with islands where non-cohesive content is separated from one another.

Update regularly: check for example once every month your articles and improve where appropriate: cohesiveness, spelling mistakes, new insights, etc.

Allow visitors to place comments using Disquss that has become a social media platform where you can attract inbound links.

Useful Drupal SEO modules

6. Page title

By default Drupal has one field to enter the title of an article. This title is used for both the page title as the ‘html title’:

The html title is important for SEO; usually you would like to define it differently than the readable title of the article (as the visitor is viewing it). This module is solving this problem and allows you to manage two titles individually.

You can also give the HTML title a particular predefined format so that it is created depending on the content type. For example “Blog Lucius | 18 Drupal SEO modules and tools for better findability in Google”. Where ‘Blog Lucius’ is always automatically stated in the beginning of the title with a pipe (‘|’) in between.

7. Metatags

Years ago meta keywords were one of the most important elements used to be found. But not anymore, Google is finding your Drupal site mainly with content and links to your pages. The meta keywords are still important but mainly for:

Indicating snippets The (summary) text about your page that will appear in the search engine:

Open Graph implementation Rapidly emerging technology, important for previewing your page on social media and now also in for example Gmail:

9. Pathauto persistent state

The popular Drupal module Pathauto is useful for automatically creating nice URL’s. It is also possible to exclude particular content from an ‘automatic alias’ and then manually enter the URL.

Pathauto sometimes ‘forgets’ that the URL of certain articles was manually set, and creates them again automatically. As a result the URL of your page could change without you realizing it, not handy..

This Drupal module is solving this problem: it makes sure that Pathauto remembers for which articles you have turned off ‘automatic alias’.

10. Global redirect

Avoid duplicate content. Ensures for example that ‘node/123’ is no longer available, but only the search engine friendly URL. It also checks if clean URL’s are enabled and checks whether visitors have access before performing a redirect.

11. Redirect

It can happen that the title of an article needs to be changed, usually the URL is changing then as well. This module creates a 301 — Permanent redirect so that the users from an old URL are automatically redirected to the new path. This way Google also knows that the new URL needs to be indexed and that the old one can be removed.

13. HTML Purifier

14. Search 404

A standard 404 page (‘page not found’) is providing rather brief information for your visitor. This popular module is changing this: it does not show a static page, but will search in your Drupal system and will show visitors results of pages they might have been searching for. This feature will also have a positive influence on the SEO of your Drupal system.

There are alternatives to integrate in Drupal websites. Below we will give you a few reasons why we currently prefer the Bootstrap framework.

Why a HTML framework

First of all, why should you use a HTML framework? These possibilities also exist:

1) Write everything fully by hand:

Nowadays responsiveness is required with almost every new website. Bootstrap is offering cross-browser compatibility for this. To build the required responsiveness every time from scratch would make no sense.

2) Ready-made Drupal themes

You can download free Drupal themes or buy them ready-made. This will take you quickly in the right direction, but ‘the devil is in the details’. The final details are usually difficult, but necessary to make your desired layout. The problems are usually caused by not knowing the code and the code is often not scalable designed for your purposes. It can become a kind of Rube goldberg machine to you.

Why Bootstrap

#1) Good documentation

It has become a widely used framework in Drupal. The Drupal Bootstrap base theme has currently almost 300.000 downloads and 50.000 installations. It is not only used in the Drupal community, other popular CMS systems, like Wordpress, also make extensive use of it.As a result of this broad implementation, a lot of documentation is available and most questions are already answered on forums like StackOverflow.

#2) Good Drupal integration

Since we are a Drupal shop, scalability and flexibility of the integration are necessary. And of course this is offered, the technique of Drupal Bootstrap basis theme is excellent. It is even integrated with Bootswatch themes, so you can instantly choose from 14 ready-made templates.

#3) Many ready-made free templates

Because it is used worldwide, there are many websites that offer paid and unpaid Bootstrap HTML templates, for example:

#4) Many components (snippets) are already available

Websites usually consist of similar content: homepage, list pages, news items, blog, contact, drop down menu, slider with pictures etc. But also think of elements such as a profile page, a timeline, or a login screen.There are many websites that offer such components (snippets) within the Bootstrap HTML framework. Some examples:

A useful dropdown selector with filter function

Data tables

Data tables are providing performance optimalisation compared to standard Drupal Views. Data tables are loading all ‘tabular data’ and creates pages using jQuery. This will make a difference in the server requests when requesting each new page.

#5) Integrates with WYSIWYG

When you are working with content managers, you like them to see the text format as the visitor gets to see them. In other words: the text in the wyiwyg editor must be consistent with the front end. With Bootstrap this is relatively simple.

Relevant Drupal modules

Get started with Bootstrap in Drupal, this will give you a kick start:

And many more. Not everything in this list is bootstrap integration, it also contains results of modules that say something about ‘Drupal’s bootstrap process’. But that’s another chapter :)

Wrap up

Alright, that’s it. As always, don’t hesitate to contact me in case of questions or feedback!

Over the last year a key objective for the Technology team at Comic Relief has been to build products not websites. Tech Lead, Peter Vanhee, explained in a previous blog post how we’re using Drupal 8 to create a reusable platform product for building campaign websites. Since then the team have been working to deliver another website using the platform codebase and also preparing to open-source the codebase.

We strongly believe that working in the open and contributing to the open-source community makes our products better and makes us stronger as a team. It helps us prioritise work more easily as we can be clear about what is and isn’t important to the product, it allows us to say “no” to one hit wonder feature requests and it makes us stricter about dealing with technical debt and ensuring we have appropriate detail in supporting documentation. It is also a fantastic and motivating feeling for the whole team to know that their work is open to others to see and contribute to, and we hope it will allow us to engage further with the thriving open source community and get some external help to expand our codebase further.

Many charities and not for profit organisations are not big enough to have the size of development team we are lucky to have. We feel strongly that we want to help smaller organisations when we can and one of our main motivations for making our platform product open was that other organisations can use it to build their websites. This has already proved successful with Comic Relief’s sister organisation, Red Nose Day USA, using our code to deliver their website in May, shaving months off the time it took to deliver.

Journey to open source

We had to overcome a few obstacles before we were able to open our codebase. These were mostly due to a lack of understanding about what open-source meant and what benefits it could bring to Comic Relief.

Some people asked why we would give away our hard work for free – our view is that we are already benefiting from using Drupal 8, which is open source software itself, so feel that we have a duty to contribute back. We also feel that we have additional, possibly unique, knowledge to add to the community based on our experience of delivering high profile campaign websites each year. We know that Drupal is a commonly chosen technology for other charities and we believe that reducing duplication of work in the sector is worthwhile and an example of how Comic Relief is able to support other charities in a way beyond purely financial.

There was understandable nervousness around security. There is of course a lot diligence required before making code public, including selecting the right license (we choose GNU GPL v2), managing secrets and ensuring that everyone is happy for feature conversations to be available for everyone to see. These considerations are not to be underestimated and take time to resolve. It is also something that needs constant review and should be built into ongoing working practises and team culture. For us, the discipline and professionalism required for working in the open is a significant benefit.

Also, there were a few questions about why we needed to open-source. This was particularly pertinent when it came to prioritising development work as the work required to get us ready to open-source sometimes meant that there was delay to new features being delivered. We combatted this by being clear about the benefits to Comic Relief – there are many, as mentioned above, but additionally we believe the quality of our work will increase with more people to spot bugs and help fix them, we will see an increase in efficiency and reduction in duplication and we will hopefully receive contributions from others that will improve our codebase even further.

Our advice if you’re wanting to open-source your code, or code in the open, is to engage the rest of your organisation early and listen to any reservations people may have. When confronted with internal reservations around going open source, it required us to have patience and perseverance in order to educate our stakeholders about the benefits and reassure them about their perceived risk. Be clear about what the benefits are to your organisation and highlight how the way you work will continue to support your open-source software appropriately. We also found it helpful to show examples of other organisations who have worked in the open such as the BBC, the Guardian and the Government Digital Service.

What is next

Our intention is to continue to open-source our code where we think it could be useful to others and to code in the open wherever possible. We have kick started a mindset shift so that at the start of each new project we try to be open, rather than closed, from the beginning. Live examples of this include developing the pattern lab (which we hope will be useful to partners) and the grants API (demonstrating that prototypes can be developed in the open).

We’re hoping to have discussions and feature requests coming in from other charities looking to adopt our technology and we’ll continue to add new components to the codebase and will be maintaining our workflow queues to organise new work and future iterations.

Finally, we’d love to see other charity websites being powered by our codebase, so please take a look at our open GitHub repositories here. We’d love to hear what you think and your experiences of moving towards open source, or working in the open.

This past weekend was a busy one for some of our developers who attended EBE13, a major Spanish conference for digital marketing, blogging, social media, and online communication, held annually in Seville, not far from our Cocomore in Spain, which drew over 1000 developers this year. Christian Lopez (aka Penyaskito on Drupal.org and Twitter), participated as an expert panelist representing Drupal in a "round table" moderated debate, lending much credibility to our favorite popular open-source CMS and Web application framework. He spoke about typical use cases for Drupal, as well as some unusual places he has seen Drupal in action, such as in a POS system in McDonalds, among other odd uses. He was joined by Isidro Baquero, representing Joomla, and Rafael Poveda, representing Wordpress. The debate was moderated by Agile trainer and coach, Jeronimo Palacios.

What they learned was that, in the end, everyone who actively contributes to open-source is a winner, regardless of the technology! The benefits of being a part of a great open-source community turned out to be the most compelling reason for using each of these projects. Of course there are other strong reasons we, at Cocomore, favor Drupal, but involvement with a greater development community is a good way to become an expert in the CMS you use. So if you work with Drupal (or Wordpress or Joomla or any other open-source CMS), finding ways to contribute will help you grow as well as improving the code base that you use.

There is an active attempt to fork the Drupal content management system into a new application:

Backdrop — a play on Drupal's name and origin, which originally intended to be dorp.org (Dutch: village), but due to a typo, became drop.org in 2001. Shortly after, drop.org was renamed to drupal.org.

As the name suggests, Backdrop's intention is to get back to the roots of Drupal:

Quality

Simplicity

Developer Experience and Productivity

Performance

Targeted vision and use-case

The project was kick-started and is driven by a few people that I personally respect and value a lot. In fact, they are representing a group of brilliant people and excellence, which originally turned Drupal into the product that it is today. A group that felt ignored and unheard in the recent past — even though it were primarily these and like-minded people who enabled the world to interpret Drupal as a real product and competition in the first place.

To be clear: Do not try this at home. The attempt of forking Drupal involves hundreds of factors that you are not considering. There have been many attempts in the past, but not a single one succeeded. Yours will not succeed either. Backdrop may or may not be an exception.(Did I phrase this clear enough?)

The root of all concerns is Drupal 8, which is in development and undergoes major architectural changes for ~3 years already. Though, despite all changes, there's little to no innovation compared to the competition. The focus is to clean up and modernize all core code and APIs, with the intended goal of ending up with a base system whose architecture is more maintainable and sustainable in the future.

The current state of Drupal 8 is poor and not worth to talk about. However, the final and intended state seems to present a clear and diametrical conflict to the former goals, qualities, values, and roots of the original Drupal project.

The situation

I talked to various different parties. What I learned is simple:

People are not listening to each other.

People do not appear to remotely see the points that others are trying to make. In both directions. Assumptions are utterly wrong, frontiers are built before having any clue at all, counter-arguments are overly naive and misguided, and all communication is generally hindered by a good amount of bad-ass trolling.

What I heard was offensive defense and disagreement. No one appears to listen and to truly perceive and understand all arguments, before drawing any kind of lines and/or conclusions.

As if, you know, the world was flat.

In short, a simple and common conflict resolution scenario.

This blog post originally aimed to cover all aspects on the idea of forking Drupal and my personal stance on this particular fork, but after gathering more and more insights on the current situation, I decided to leave out and save those parts for a future post.

Therefore, this post reflects on the communication conflict only.

Solutions are possible. They will require changes. They will cause conflicts. It is a matter of will, listening, and dedication. It is a matter of respect.

Disconnect in Dissent

In analyzing the situation, and in distilling and deciphering all arguments, I did notice that there appears to be a rather large disconnect in understandings and communication.

It's important to note upfront that the situation did not suddenly appear a week ago, but actually evolved over the past ~2 years throughout the Drupal 8 development cycle.

Drupal core developers appear to be coming from a mindset that is deeply stuck in refactoring work of internal core framework subsystems, which happens to involve plenty of abstractions and complexity. These were major and important undertakings, but in all of this work, not much thought went into the question of how verbose these concepts need to be for the average module developer.

A few core developers are showing good will to fix and improve minor developer experience issues. Some others do not appear to see any issues at all, and they seem to not only ignore the arguments that are being raised, but even strongly and blatantly argue against them. Tension appears to be caused by an attitude of:

I am right and know better, and you are just simply wrong.

...which doesn't make it sound as if anyone was listening.

Conversely, people who are looking at the current state of art are deeply confused as to why so much internal complexity and abstractions are verbosely exposed in the user space, and whether that is really necessary.

From what I've heard, the scope and extent of concerns does not encompass a few individual improvements here and there, but instead, is asking for major changes to remove all unnecessary complexity and ensure simplicity (and productivity, for that matter) in user space code.

The primary disconnect appears to be a major difference in understanding of what exactly is interpreted as "complex."

There further appears to be a misunderstanding in that people would have a general problem with object-oriented code, which is not only misguided but also makes an insulting assumption on the technical learnability skills of others. As a consequence, a line is drawn between parties that does not actually exist, which in turn hinders constructive communication.

The same consideration appears to be further manifested by the assumption that the target developer audience of Drupal 8 would be different. Equally based on the idea that novice PHP developers and hobbyists would not be capable to understand and learn object-oriented code. This nonsensical assumption clearly appears to stem from the disparity in understanding of what exactly "complexity" constitutes.

All communication appears to be distorted by another disturbing detail: The API freeze for Drupal 8 was officially announced already, despite the fact that literally everyone and all parties appear to agree that the current state is a total mess and not remotely releasable. This aspect especially supports the resignation of the non-core party, as they're in fact asking for major API changes, which obviously presents yet another unnecessary conflict.

Drupal appears to have taken steps to remedy the situation through a new D8DX initiative. But coherent to all other communications, this initiative starts with a big list of things that are out of question, and just continues with a list of minor issues that may be debatable. In other words, directly building a frontier, before even starting to listen.Update: It appears the initiative page has been corrected to somewhat address this issue.

Conclusion

It's a tough situation, because there's a lot of frustration all around. In fact, no one appears to be happy with anything. The lack of a clear leadership, ownership, and authority certainly contributed to the final path that slowly but certainly turned frustration into resignation.

Now the question is whether everything sucks and it's too late, or whether there is a chance to resolve the situation by taking a large step back (stop coding, start listening) and bring everyone on one round table to find concrete, working solutions.

Solutions are very well possible. But they certainly require everyone to leave their comfort zone, start being receptive, listen to and ensure to comprehend concerns of others, accept that there are different world perspectives, and most importantly, to allow yourself to make compromises.

My recommendation is to not calm down and defend, downplay, or ignore the issue. Also, don't be afraid, don't be a jerk, and don't be a hardliner. Instead, I want to encourage you to be open, welcoming, collaborative, and constructive in everything you do. Respect others, respect the culture. In short, respect

I felt like working in a niche until November 2011. I did not believe there was anyone else beyond me in my local area who's seriously using Drupal. But — it was on my walk to the grocery store when two strangers suddenly crossed the street, bumped into me and said "Dude, are you sun from drupal.org?"

How wrong I was. I started my local user group shortly after, in November 2011. Out of fucking nowhere, 12+ people attended the first meeting! With a huge interest in Drupal and fostering a local user group.

Meanwhile, the Drupal User Group Karlsruhe is close to its 1st anniversary. And, we've adopted the DrupalCon spirit recently: We are meeting once a month. We're meeting in a different location each time. The location is different, just like our members are. We want to learn about new things. And the location shouldn't be excluded.

We want to share and exchange knowledge, about Drupal and the world. But how?

The cause.

We originally started to organize our meetings in a Facebook group, via Doodle events, and groups.drupal.org. Plenty of organizational overhead and problems with that:

Facebook groups, even though "public", are only public within Facebook, but cannot be accessed nor found from the outside world. Many people understandably do not want to sign up due to data privacy concerns, and have other good reasons to stay away from it. Inaccessible, in terms of accessibility.

Doodle events are not found anywhere to begin with.

groups.drupal.org has groups and events. But not even long-term users are able to figure out how to use the site in a way that allows to locate and distill the events of actual interest. How are new users supposed to do that then? But nevermind, ~80% of my group members didn't have a drupal.org user account in the first place! (geez, what? — Effin' register now if you're using Drupal but don't have one yet!)

Conclusion: We need our own web site.

We need to be found on the net. And in search results. We need to make it trivial for interested people to join. We need our own mechanisms to figure out the next meeting location. We are our own local Drupal sub-community. We need to feel home, and we need a way to communicate with each other. This matters.

There's excellent shit for that. — But wait.

Question:

What's the problem?

or:

How many things can we attack by asking the right questions?

A concrete use-case.

Jeff Eaton preached it all over again at DrupalCons and camps all over the world. Dries Buytaert repetitively stated it in keynotes. And even Drupal usability team leads Roy Scholten and Bojhan Somers want it: Installation profiles and distributions.

Tailored to a specific use-case.

Since Drupal 5 in 2007, the installation profile functionality in Drupal core was heavily improved. Given these improvements, the community tried hard to reach consensus on the fact that profiles and distros are a good thing.

Years of discussions later. Under the working title Snowman [also: "Onramp"], a concrete scope and use-case for an installation profile to be shipped with Drupal core was developed:

Small groups collaborating on a project who want to tell the world about it... and convince others to join in.

A solid and focused use-case.

Given that, the Drupal community dived into shitloads of discussions on which functionality would be required in core that doesn't exist yet. And we looked into potential consumers and adopters for that use-case. For example, the global Occupy movement.

Missing the obvious. Not realizing that we have the identical and perfect match of a use-case within the Drupal community ourselves:

Hundreds of local Drupal User Groups all around the world have a SHARED INTEREST!

We want to communicate with each other and the world about Drupal, and our interest is to on-board new people into our local groups. Transferring and sharing knowledge. Taking Drupal to the next level.

Is there any better incentive to work on Drupal?

Missing Drupal resources.

You hear the same story. Shuffle. Repeat: Some contributors find their way to contributed projects, but have no idea and are scared of Drupal core. People are not able to find skilled Drupal service providers — they're swamped with work already. And companies that are relying on Drupal and employing people don't manage to increase their skills.

Dries depicted the Drupal Learning Curve in 2007. I revised that into the Real Drupal Learning Curve later — showing the giant gap between people who stay in custom code forever and those who make the massive leap of contributing to Drupal core.

Once you take that path, your skills drastically improve. On all levels.

Hundreds of local Drupal User Groups all around the world have PLENTY OF PEOPLE.

Did you know that even a single Drupal core patch makes a significant difference on your resume?

Mentor Drupal talent.

Did you ever consider to contribute to Drupal? Did you ever consider to help someone to contribute to Drupal? Did you know that there are thousands of people who are only seeking for some minimal guidance?

Have you been inspired, influenced, or brought into Drupal by someone else? People who explained stuff to you, but actually didn't have any reason to waste their time with you? And did you learn something new?

Truth is: You weren't in the position you are today, if there wouldn't have been others from who you've learned. That applies to you, me, and everyone else.

It only takes the effect of a fucking dead pixel on your screen to understand the impact of a single link in the chain. Let's pretend the one who taught you about Drupal was that pixel — you'd be excited about his/her exceptional behavior compared to all others, but would you give a shit?

But what if you were that dead pixel, the dead link in the chain?

You are.

And you can give a shit. But you can also start to make a difference. Whatever know-how you gained and have, you can truly pay it forward. You can ask yourself where to start. But did you know?

Hundreds of local Drupal User Groups all around the world have a SHITLOAD OF TALENT!

Stop fucking ask yourself where to start. Go to your local user group (or initiate one). Grab yourself some attendees and mentor them in contributing to Drupal. Pay it forward.

They'll be excited to learn about what's going on with Drupal and how they can contribute to Drupal. Bridging the gap? Totally no better way to do that.

If you need more support, there's an entire Drupal Core Mentoring effort to support you. A true guide for new contributors to find appropriate tasks for their skill level, with a shittonne of stunning results!

Help them to contribute to Drupal. So they are going to educate, help, and train others to become better, in turn!

Sanity testing.

Drupal 5 was the last release that was deployed on drupal.org during development. Gone are the times in which we ate our own dog food before releasing the fancy new shit — determining bugs and revealing nonsense early — when things can still be changed, before publicly releasing to the masses.

Today, drupal.org is driven by 100+ contributed modules. There's no way to keep that code in sync with the daily API changes that are happening for Drupal core.

But real world testing is important. Most of us don't have an incentive to use the latest and greatest code. We're missing an essential feedback mechanism to learn about mistakes early. We need qualified feedback from people. Before it is too late. Guess what?

Hundreds of local Drupal User Groups all around the world can TEST!

We can restore true production site testing and the lack of that feedback mechanism.

Whose sites would be better suited than those of local Drupal User Groups? What kind of fancy functionality do you have on there that couldn't be restored within minutes on a fresh site? All we need and all we should need for that use-case is Drupal core... [rewind and circle back into the above]

(And if all fails, what other data than the user accounts do you really need?)

Rumors are, some Drupal hosting providers will happily hand your local user group one of their managed full stack environments if you decide to contribute to Drupal core in this way, so your group doesn't have to deal with infrastructure/devops shit and can focus on contributing![Providers: Feel free to state your offer and how to apply in comments!]

Focus on user needs.

Some initiatives are driving some major architectural changes for Drupal 8 in dedicated working groups. Exciting! Everyone of us is on fucking steroids to get those done! But.

The solution.

Explain to everyone how awesome it is to change the system while we can. Tell them how adjusting it for their needs makes their lives so much fucking easier.

Build your local Drupal User Group web site on Drupal 8. Don't be scared. Take the challenge, learn and help to create something new with others!

Help to build the Snowman installation profile for Drupal 8, for your very own user group.

Attract new Drupal people by just appearing in your local user group.

Solve the Drupal talent problem by mentoring someone (or two)!

Ensure Drupal 8 works, by testing it live.

Make Drupal awesome by solving actual user problems.

You can contribute on so many levels. Don't make the mistake that it was about coding only. There's usability, design, project management/coordination (pushing shit forward), front-end/JS/CSS, manual testing, performance testing, and tons of other areas!

What you get. For free:

Native HTML5 output.(a.k.a. html5 and html5_tools in core)

A new configuration system.(a.k.a. Configuration staging [and a bit of Features] in core)

A new RESTful HTTP router system?(a.k.a. Services in core)

A fully multilingual and translatable system?(a.k.a. i18n and Entity translation in core)